As a solo DBA with 10 years more exp in other DBs and with less than a dozen servers with relatively small (<100GB total) and simple DBs, it makes sense for us to use Maintenance Plans -- at least for now. Should I get hit by the proverbial bus, I believe it's much more likely that someone else could easily identify, troubleshoot, and maintain the Maintenance Plans over scripts.

And if I can ever get our 2K5 servers upgraded from SP2 to SP3, the backups might actually work more consistently, but that's another thread... 😉

Rich